The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
In model-based testing of software, a test system creates and stores a finite state machine (FSM) representation of an application under test, a set of state transitions, and algorithms to navigate through the FSM and perform various tests at different points of execution of the application. The FSM representation is known as a model. IBM Rational® Functional Tester for Java™ and Web, from IBM Corporation's Rational® business unit, is one known platform that is useful for model-based testing of Web browser and Java™ applications because the scripting language is Java™. Use of Java™ as a scripting language facilitates creation of the complex data structures required to drive a model-based test.
However, a drawback of current model-based testing systems is that it is labor-intensive and time-consuming to create and maintain the data structures that drive the model or FSM. Having an automatic way to generate a model for use with a model-based testing system is desirable. IBM Rational® Functional Tester for Java™ and Web does not provide for automatically generating a model.
WINRUNNER, commercially available from MERCURY INTERACTIVE, creates and stores information about graphical user interface (GUI) elements that are generated by an application under test, known as a GUI Map. However, the scripting language of WINRUNNER lacks the power needed to create and maintain the extensive data-structures required to track and navigate an application model.
TESTMASTER, from TERADYNE, requires the user to generate the model of the application by hand. The user must draw all the states and transitions to those states. There is no support to automatically select GUI objects on the screen and associate them to proper transitions; manual work is required to associate transitions. There are no programming facilities or “hooks” for the user to program business logic and back-end tests (“verification points”) to be performed at different states of the application.
A test system called TAU is commercially available from TELELOGIC. With TAU, although user can enter a graphical representation of test cases, doing so is not equivalent to a model of the application. The automated testing is procedural rather than model-based. The code generated from TAU cannot be used for GUI testing because, as with TESTMASTER, there is no GUI map to associate with a GUI test program.
Based on the foregoing, there is a clear need for methods, systems, or other means for automatically generating data associated with model-based testing of computer programs. There is a particular need for such methods, systems or other means for use with programs that generate a GUI.